The Red Guard Spirit Still Haunts China and Its Current Leadership

Chinese leader Xi Jinping attends the opening of the first session of the 14th National People's Congress at The Great Hall of People on March 5, 2023 in Beijing, China. China's annual political gathering known as the Two Sessions will convene leaders and lawmakers to set the government's agenda for domestic economic and social development for the year. Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

News Analysis

The most famous Red Guard during China’s Cultural Revolution, a decade of violence and chaos from the mid-1960s to 1970s, died last month at the age of 77.

However, experts told The Epoch Times that the spirit of Cultural Resolution is far from dead in China.

Members of the current Chinese communist leadership received high school and college education during that period and still bear the Red Guard marks shown in their policies and behaviors, experts said, such as the infamous “wolf warrior” diplomacy and the relentless pursuit of unifying Taiwan with force.

Shi Shan, a China expert and contributor to The Epoch Times, said these behaviors continue the Cultural Revolutionary tradition of aggression without compromise.

He said that by referring to the “hundred-year storm” repeatedly since 2017, Chinese leader Xi Jinping meant establishing a new world order in a style mirroring the late Chinese communist chairman Mao Zedong’s claim of “daring to make the sun and the moon shine in new skies,” a famous poem by Mao describing peasants usurping landlords in China.

Shi said that Deng Xiaoping, the communist leader known for starting China’s economic reform in the 1980s, wanted to designate cadres born in the 1960s to lead China following Hu Jintao—a head figure widely perceived as transitory.

According to Shi, Deng deliberately sought to bypass the Red Guards in leadership roles because of their violent tendencies and lack of proper education during their formative years, as most schools were disrupted or closed during the Cultural Revolution.

However, Deng’s successor, Jiang Zemin, supported Xi’s succession to Hu. In 1975, a year before the end of the Cultural Revolution, Xi attended China’s top Tsinghua University in Beijing as a “worker-peasant-soldier” student, a special admissions category often taken advantage of by communist cadres. Xi’s family is not part of any of those three categories. China is thus under the governance of people who went to college during the Cultural Revolution based on their identity as workers, farmers, or soldiers, not on academic merits.

Shi said that China’s education in the past decade returned to the Cultural Revolution style under Xi and that such a Chinese generation might behave accordingly in the international community in the future.

A Red Guard Generation

Song Binbin, the most famous Red Guard and symbol of the violence of the cultural revolution, was the daughter of Song Renqiong, a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official.

She became widely known after meeting Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square in 1966, where he praised her for her revolutionary zeal. During the Cultural Revolution, Song was known for her alleged organization of an attack on the deputy principal of her high school in Beijing; the educator died from severe beatings on Aug. 5, 1966.

Years later, Song left China to study in the United States, keeping a low profile and distancing herself from her past. In 2014, she issued a public apology for her role in the violence and expressed regret for the harm she caused during the Cultural Revolution. She died on Sept. 16 in the United States, where she spent her last years receiving cancer treatments.

Most of the Red Guards grew up in a hateful environment that took a toll on their mental health, according to Wang Weiluo, a hydrology expert who grew up during the Cultural Revolution.

“It is a great misfortune for the Chinese people that this generation is now in power in China,” Wang told The Epoch Times.

Six members of the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, the CCP’s top decision-making body, reached college age before the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The only exception is Ding Xuexiang, the sixth-ranked member, who turned 14 when the violent political movement ended.

Inside the CCP, leaders of a younger generation—10 or more years younger than the Red Guards—hold very different views. Many Chinese military generals belong to this younger demographic and have degrees from prestigious universities and strong technical expertise.

According to Shi, in their view, Xi often acts irrationally and even defies common sense, leading these subordinates to harbor private disagreements, and the conflicts between them and the Xi administration are bound to intensify further.

‘Wolf Warriors’ Continue Red Guard Diplomacy

“Wolf warrior diplomacy” has a lesser known heritage—"Red Guard diplomacy.”

In March 2021, the Chinese embassy in France publicly called a French think tank scholar a “mad hyena” who “furiously attacks China” because he criticized Beijing’s stance on Taiwan. In the same year, a Chinese diplomat in Pakistan, a Mao worshiper, said on Twitter that the way to deal with China’s enemies is to give them the middle finger.

The late Huang Hua, former foreign minister of the CCP from 1976 to 1982, said in his article “Absurd Diplomacy during the Cultural Revolution” that after the start of the Cultural Revolution, almost all of the CCP’s ambassadors and counselors abroad were brought back to China, and many of them became targets of denunciation and harsh crackdowns.

Suddenly, the CCP’s foreign embassies could not function normally, Huang wrote. Under the influence of ultra-leftist ideology, the CCP focused its propaganda in foreign countries on promoting Mao Zedong Thought. The newly installed envoys disregarded diplomatic norms and forcibly educated other countries that Beijing was the world’s center of revolutions.

Ultimately, their aggressive actions led to the deterioration of bilateral relations with nearly 30 of the more than 40 countries with which the CCP had established diplomatic or quasi-diplomatic relations, some to the point of complete severance, according to Huang.

Sheng Xue, a Toronto-based democracy activist and writer on China affairs, described Xi’s foreign policy as brutal and overbearing in style.

“Lacking the ability to engage wisely with the outside world, the Red Guard generation relies on hardline Marxist-Leninist principles as a framework for dealing with the world. This misguided approach has brought us to wanton confrontation with the entire world,” Sheng said.

Sheng also said that among the generations of CCP leaders, Xi’s style helps the world see the CCP for what it is.

An Opportunity for China

Deng, who became paramount leader shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution, was a victim of the political upheaval.

He fell out of political favor in the 1960s for advocating economic reforms that clashed with Mao’s vision and was forced to resign from all his positions. His family, like many others, suffered during this turbulent time. His eldest son, Deng Pufang, was particularly affected—Red Guards severely beat him and then threw him out of a window, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.

Despite this personal tragedy, Deng avoided any extensive criticism of Mao. Instead, he sought to maintain political stability by preserving Mao’s image as a “great leader” who was “70 percent right and 30 percent wrong.”

Shi believes that Deng’s pragmatic approach had a negative impact—it deprived the Chinese people of the opportunity to truly reflect on the Cultural Revolution.

Now, Shi sees a new opening for China.

“Song Binbin, an iconic figure of the Red Guards, has died. Her passing signals the beginning of that generation’s gradual exit from the world stage,” he said.

“I hope that may offer China’s youth an opportunity to break free from the ghost of the Cultural Revolution.”